Beyond the issue of length, there’s also the issue of
messaging. I think the people designing these ads
think they’re projecting competency.
>Look at all the stuff I can list!
>Source?
>Citation needed
And maybe, to
people of a
certain disposition, having “sources”
does make for an appealing ad. It provides opportunities for
verbal oneupmanship, and that’s a third of today’s political discourse. There’s even a part of me that is
sympathetic to the desire for more facts-driven,
long-form political conversation.
The problem is that a bunch of
fine print also conveys sneakiness, duplicitousness, legal maneuvering, etc. How many movies and television shows feature the devil (or someone aping his style) using the fine print on a contract to manipulate someone?
A lot. So many that
Metalocalypse goofed on this concept by having the main characters out-lawyer the devil. Fine print means “thing that will be used to fuck you over later on” to many people.
It would have been
so easy to restructure this ad in a way that satisfies the policy-wonk crowd
and everyone else. Have the best and coolest Democrat factoid in gigantic letters. Then another in slightly smaller font. Keep doing this until you get to the fine print seen in the actual advert. That would make a big headline out of something the Democrats want to emphasize, while
still playing up the whole “we’re the party of science” bullshit routine. It’s just
so incompetent - people are
more likely to distrust the source after seeing this, lol,
